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If you’re wondering whether to invest in a marble splashback, gold taps or a polished concrete floor, read on. Let the trends picked up at this year’s London Design Festival (LDF) help you to decide. At the same time, however, always remember that while the most stylish homes may absorb design trends, they will also – just as with design rules – take them with a hefty pinch of salt and confidently ignore them.
… all over the Festival there were accessories inspired by the look of this retro material. Sevak Zargarian’s clay Unearthed collection, pictured here, is shot through with shards of a marble-like porcelain material called Parian for a similar effect.
Danish designer Troels Flenstedmixed acrylic powder, resin and ‘speckles’ of coloured pigment to create his Poured tables and Poured bowls, which also have the appearance of terrazzo. Olivia Aspinall’s tiles tapped into the trend too.
Elsewhere, the effect was created using heat-resistant rubber. Swiss design duo Loris & Livia took inspiration from the speckled flooring on London Underground carriages for their coasters and placemats.
The base mix for terrazzo – the bit that the ‘speckles’ are set into – is often concrete. However, the whole mixture can also be made with plastics, and this has opened up a new, interesting and eco-friendly direction, since it works very well with recycled materials. Expect to see lots of examples coming your way.
So many stands featured different approaches to this textured wall panel theme and a multitude of materials were used.
Pietraelite went retro and rustic, while Warssawa showcased a pastel-hued geometric cement tile range, and new graduate Anni Taverner’s antique-effect panels incorporated gilded metals and verdigris.
That doesn’t mean metallics are out of fashion at all, more that a new approach to these materials is coming through in the form of oxidised and rusted metals. In the same way that antiqued mirror is becoming popular, this ‘lived-in’ approach to metallics adds character to a space and, with orange and brown tones, plenty of warm colour too.
Here, the finish has been used in sheet form to create wall panels, and this look is something that’s starting to be used outside, in garden features or as cladding for extensions. But it can be small-scale, too: at LDF, Mammalampa’s Queen pendant shades – gold coloured on the inside and oxidised on the outside – were spotted at the Mint Furniture stand.
Browse the Houzz photos tab for ‘marble’ and most of the images you’ll find feature a stone that’s predominantly grey and white in tone.What we spotted around the various shows and events at this year’s LDF were more marble features that used warmer or coloured incarnations: browns, sandy shades and pinks.
This was also a trend highlighted in a talk by trend forecasting company WGSN at 100% Design as something to watch out for in spring/summer 2018.
Tiles, overlapping somewhat with the already-mentioned wall panelling, were everywhere.
Although the hugely patterned encaustic concrete tiles we’ve loved for the past few years aren’t going anywhere, what was on show during the Festival was something new. Rather than pattern from colour, the trend was for pattern formed by the shape of the tiles themselves, as seen in this kitchen.
3D was a big look, with Theia Creative Tiles providing a good example of tactile geometric designs that stand out from the wall. Concrete hexagon tiles with colourful borders were used to decorate Charlene Mullen’s stand, perhaps hinting at a chunkier new direction for this already popular eight-sided trend, while at the Ateliers Zelij stand, beautiful, one-colour mosaics had been made from uneven tile fragments to create texture.
We are so proud to support the Gidget Foundation, so they can, in turn, support more expectant and new parents experiencing perinatal depression and anxiety.
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